Westeros

Following our previous report on Voyager‘s plans to re-release the “A Song of Ice and Fire” e-books, A Game of Thrones has been released for Kindle in the U.K. in a thoroughly-proofed and newly reset edition. Via Twitter, Voyager has reported that A Clash of Kings is due February 3rd, A Storm of Swords late in February, and A Feast for Crows in March.

Also via Twitter, their plans are to release the e-book of A Dance with Dragons simultaneously with its hardcover publication.

This is a fun one from TCA, as the opening of the interview begins with some geeky discussion as to whether Westeros really counts as a single kingdom, and whether there’s actually seven or eight kingdoms within it. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss reiterate that a chief reason for producing the show “the HBO way” is that it allows them to be very faithful to the source material. They recognize they won’t make 100% of the fans happy, but they’re confident most of them will be:

(The answer to the question, by the by, is that Westeros is one kingdom, made up of the seven former kingdoms which existed at the time of Aegon’s conquest. We assume the reference to eight refers to the Iron Islands, but at the time of the Conquest the kingdom of the Iron Isles and the Trident was unified.)

Thanks to mediawill for the pointer!

First off, a pleasant surprise today was seeing Adam Serwer of The American Prospect, a leading liberal editorial magazine in the United States, sharing a blog post enthusing about A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones. Serwer touches on the aspects of the series that most appeal to him, particularly the moral ambiguities in the characters and conflicts in the setting as compared to that ur-text of epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings.

Combined with Alyssa Rosenberg’s blog posts for The Atlantic about the series, and Pat W. Caldwell’s tweet about Serwer’s piece, is Game of Thrones appealing enough to wonks and pundits to become a cultural artefact worth using as a wobbly jumping-off point for thoughtful political commentary? I’ll believe it once Matthew Yglesias starting talking about it. (I would have said Brad DeLong, but he’s already read the series!)

Also, as promised yesterday, MTV has released another video interview, this one with George R.R. Martin himself, as he discusses his approach to writing A Song of Ice and Fire:

More TCA-recorded goodness from MTV, as they now share their interview with Peter Dinklage. He seems to be one of those actors a bit hesitant about calling the series fantasy, and to be fair, his part of the story is mostly without any fantastical elements to it. And compared to Narnia (in which he acted in Prince Caspian), it’s practically mundane:

Two little tidbits of information have come our way via Bantam, the U.S. publishers of A Song of Ice and Fire, that we thought we’d share:

• Recently, rumor claimed that the audio books of the series were going to be recalled and replaced with new editions voiced by at least some of the actors from the series, with additional sound effects and music. However, this is untrue. What Bantam is doing is preparing to release the A Game of Thrones audio book with the new HBO art when ready (we’ve reported on the plans previously). There are no plans whatsoever to re-record, introduce sound effects, and so on at this time.
• The DelRaySpectra official twitter mentioned that they’re now labelling redone maps, plus they’ve ordered up a brand new one (which we speculate is the Free Cities map GRRM has previously mentioned.) We’re not going to read tea leaves over what this particular activity might or might not mean regarding the delayed A Dance with Dragons, but we should note that DelRaySpectra’s response refers to Tear’s map as apparently being an impetuous for Bantam commissioning redone maps.

We’re guessing this is from the TCA winter press tour, as no date is provided. After Elton, a pop culture site with a focus on topics of interest to gay men, has comments from executive producer D.B. Weiss and creator George R.R. Martin concerning the sexuality of characters in Game of Thrones. Read the extended text for possible spoilers.

MTV has shared its latest interview segment during the TCA Winter press tour, following their Emilia Clarke interview. This time, Sean Bean discusses the series, including his propensity for medieval-fantasy work. Notably, he seems to imply that he wasn’t initially very interested until he researched the series and discovered how well-regarded and popular it was, and then executive producer David Benioff (who had written Troy, in which Bean had played Odysseys) spoke with him to convince him the rest of the way:

Yesterday, Variety reported that Spanish broadcast company Antenna 3 secured the rights to a number of HBO programs, including Game of Thrones.  A3 will offer the shows on its new, free-to-air Nitro channel. Looking at the article closely, they note a fall airing for Boardwalk Empire, so it seems that they’ll be airing their HBO programs anywhere from six months to perhaps a year after Canal+ Spain’s airings of HBO’s original dramas, which they recently secured in a multi-year deal.

Speaking of Canal+, a Spanish fan on Twitter, lasultimascosas, alerted us to the fact that Canal+ Spain has now revealed some information on when the show will air in Spain. Over on their official Facebook, they’ve posted a photo gallery titled, “The game begins in May on Canal+!” So, sometime in May, but no more precise airing information yet.

Blogger Sean T. Collins, who I know best from his incisive commentary on comics (both mainstream and alt), also happens to be a fan of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire”. After a recent post about the TV series, he’s decided to expand a comment he made into a persuasive argument aimed at those who are curious about the series but aren’t decided on reading it.

A good piece, covering ground ranging from prose to themes to world-building, and all without spoilers. Have some friends or family you want to get into the series but they just aren’t budging? Point them at Sean’s write-up and it may just push them over the edge to giving the series a try.

Thanks to Manu at the French-language fantasy site, Fantasy.fr, we have a new interview with Natalia Tena which appears to have been carried out roughly in the same timeframe as Bleeding Cool’s interview in December. Here, Tena dates it a bit further by noting she had just finished filming the week before. The convention it was filmed at took place on December 18 and 19.

Tena’s remarks on Game of Thrones begins at around the six minute mark. She provides a quick synopsis of Osha, remarks on how cold Belfast was, expresses her love for Isaac Hampstead Wright (Bran), and reveals that at the time she was in the early part of reading A Storm of Swords. Good stuff… and one rather unique hat, to boot!

All right, after much clamoring, I’ve completed our high resolution screen captures from the new teaser. They can all be found in the Previews gallery, starting with this image.

What did we think of the teaser? It’s a very atmospheric presentation of the show, focused very tightly on the Iron Throne and a number of the key players, with some rather ominous dialog quoted (in a contextless way) throughout. A number of the pieces of the dialog were ones we reported in our further impressions from the 15 minute reel. We also love the final image, although whether it’s the final logo for the show, we do not know.

You can also see the Iron Throne still that was also released at the same time as the video.

Stunning new trailer for Game of Thrones—featuring some of the lines we previously reported, plus some new ones .... and our very first look at Ghost. Handsome doggie!

And that’s not all: the first official photo of the Iron Throne! To think, I got to sit in the same seat where Sean Bean, Michelle Fairley, Kit Harrington, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Peter Dinklage, Emilia Clarke, Lena Headey, Mark Addy, and Aidan Gillen had set themselves down…

But more on that later. ;) In the mean time, once you’ve stared at the video a few times, feel free to comb our screencaps

HBO has sent us word—in the midst of Golden Globe madness—that they are in fact airing a new promo piece for Game of Thrones right before the start of the final season premiere of Big Love, at 9PM Eastern. Tune in at 8:45PM to watch a special pre-show which will include this teaser!

It sounds like Making Game of Thrones is likely to release a new photo right around that time and, we hope, an on-line stream of the new promo piece. From what we’ve heard, this may be the same, short trailer shown to critics at the opening of the presentation last Friday at the Winter TCA.

We’ve previously reported the fact that both the U.S. and U.K. publishers of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” have planned to re-release A Game of Thrones with a tie-in cover featuring a photo or photos from HBO’s series. Well, it looks like we’ve now gotten our glimpse at the U.S. re-release cover from Bantam Spectra, as you can see in this promotional PDF from the publisher. The cover—to be released in trade and mass market paperback—features Daenerys and her silver, the very first Daenerys image HBO ever released. This is marked in the PDF as “For Solicitation Only”, which implies it’s possible that it won’t necessarily be the final art—and Random House has just confirmed that it’s a placeholder. But where’s this image without the solicitation mark from? Hrm…

Some other interesting details:

• It seems that some point HBO was mooting April 24th as the premiere date, as that’s what this PDF presently says.
• Paperbacks of the further novels in the series are being released with a banner on top citing the HBO series.
• The document indicates Random House (parent of Bantam Spectra) intends a full-court PR press, including television spots.
• HBO has advised Random House of a “multi-million dollar” marketing campaign in the run up to the April 17th premiere of the series.
• The re-release is due for March 22nd.

Tip of the hat to Olaf for the pointer!

This is our rather more thorough discussion of some of the things we actually see in the reel, to give more of a sense of the visual part of the adaption, but also to give a sense of some of the characters and scenes as can be grasped from what is, in the end, a very short reel that tries to capture a large part of the plot. You can read our more general, first impressions here. We’ll be focusing on the new scenes and details primarily, so in many cases we’re skipping over scenes we’ve seen in previous trailers, teasers, and the like. However, all that said, we’ll we open with the same material as HBO’s big preview trailer, what we assumed to be the reshot execution scene. Notice Theon‘s black hair.

(Note: Spoilers may be found below. Images are all previously released, but some may match scenes that were aired in the reel.)